The East Coast Mainline was quite happily run by a state company for a few years after Stagecoach (I believe) bailed on their franchise. As a state company it had high consumer satisfaction ratings, it was profitable, and as a user of said service I can confirm it was reliable. So this government sold it off to Virgin.

Resulting in me, this very evening, leaving Berwick Upon Tweed at quarter past seven, on a coach because my train had been cancelled, and getting into Leeds nearly fucking six hours later. This involved an hour's wait in Newcastle waiting for the train to appear, and then a further hour's delay sitting on said train waiting for other coaches to turn up from Edinburgh because their train had also been cancelled and the one I was on was the only one they had available going south so we had to wait for them.

And according to even the Virgin staff this isn't unusual because the rolling stock they've bought is from the Eighties, you have to shove the window down and open the door with the handle on the outside.

So what was a perfectly good, well run service has descended into a total clusterfuck. Usually that journey would take me just over three hours, but now that subsidy junkie Branson has his tax dodging paws on it I might as well just fucking walk.

Anyway here's Berwick Rangers coming back from 2-0 down to win 3-2 with a rainbow.

Not exactly, his Dad was in the army and he was born in an army camp in Austria, they split up when he was small and in those days the army housed the wife and kids until the youngest left primary school, but they had to go where they were sent, which in their case was Berwick.

His Mum was, shock horror, an immigrant from Hungary just before WW2. When she was left to her own resources when he was 11, they moved to Middlesbrough only because someone else in the camp had gone there, she could only afford the worst part of town, Cannon Street, all long gone now. So he went to a pretty rough secondary where despite being (undiagnosed) dyslexic he was top of the class! He tells an amusing story about proposing a game of rugby to the PE teacher, there were injuries and the experiment wasn't repeated.